26 March 2014

Google Robots Project Rejects US Military Funding

Google to US military - We don't need your money --

Google rejects military funding for its advanced humanoid robot | The Verge: "Google isn’t interested in taking money from DARPA because its ambitions are in the more lucrative consumer market, and any association with DARPA leads to headlines like, "What the heck will Google do with these scary military robots?" DARPA doesn’t want to give Google money because it wants to use its $2.7 billion budget to fund startups with scarce resources, not Goliath tech companies, and its investments are supposed to seed technology that can one day be purchased by the Pentagon for national defense, which Google is unlikely to play along with...."

Report: 97% Of Mobile Malware Is On Android. This Is The Easy Way You Stay Safe: "Let’s be clear. From a statistical viewpoint researcher and security specialist F-Secure got them right. Android does account for 97% of all mobile malware, but it comes from small, unregulated third party app stores predominantly in the Middle East and Asia. By contrast the percentage of apps carrying malware on Google’s official Play Store was found to be just 0.1% and F-Secure acknowledges rigorous checks mean “malware encountered there tends to have a short shelf life.” If you want to stay safe on Android there’s the solution: stick to buying apps on the [Google] Play Store[play.google.com]‎ and every one in 1000 apps you buy may have had malware for a brief period...."

Xiaomi's Hugo Barra: True world phones in 2 years, Android all the way - CNET: "...Barra emphasizes to me the company's core mission to produce "aggressively priced phones focused on performance and quality." He also says Xiaomi won't be making a Firefox OS or an Ubuntu handset. "We have no plans to do anything other than Android. There's no point. Android has a phenomenal ecosystem. I'm saying this from a practical perspective. If you look at other players who have attempted to build ecosystems and failed despite having great platforms, it's because it takes a lot of work and a lot of time to build an ecosystem," he explains. "Google has done that with Android, and we're firmly behind it. We're heavily invested as well. We don't just take Android from Google -- we make a significant amount of improvements, changes, and additions to Android. We think we've made Android an even better operating system."..."

AWS urges developers to scrub GitHub of secret keys - Security - Technology - News - iTnews.com.au: "....Earlier this year, AWS contacted Rich Mogull, analyst and CEO of Securosis after three days of unusual activity on his account had run up US$500 in charges. In a blog post from January, Mogull said he had mistakenly published his AWS secret key on GitHub. "I did not completely scrub my code before posting to GitHub. I did not have billing alerts enabled ... This was a real mistake ... I paid the price for complacency," he admitted in his blog...."

How an Under-Appreciated iOS 7 Feature Will Change the World | Cult of Mac: "...Think of wireless mesh networking as giving app developers the ability to create tiny, private or public Internets that are limited in time and place. It will have a somewhat similar impact as the Internet itself in how it undermines authority control over communication. Ubiquitous wireless mesh networking could erase many of the places and situations where connectivity isn’t possible, or connectivity over the Internet isn’t desirable. Kudos to Apple for building this into iOS 7. It’s the first major mainstream implementation of wireless mesh networking that I’m aware of. Thanks Apple’s Multipeer Connectivity Framework, wireless mesh networking is here. It’s peer-to-peer...."

Google looks at Ray-Ban, Oakley partnership for GlassZDNetGoogle says it is joining forces with the frame giant behind Ray-Ban and other brands to create and sell Glass internet-linked eyewear in the US. The California-based technology titan billed the partnership with Luxottica as its "biggest step yet into the ...

Apple, Comcast Likely to Invite ScrutinyWall Street JournalApple wants to make the service on its Apple TV as good as cable, and to do that, it's talking to Comcast, the largest cable company in the nation, ...